Memories are stepping stones to future endeavors and concurrently sticking points to moving on. I would go out on a limb and say most of us have recollections somewhere tucked away, perhaps yours in the back of the mind. Memories are the collage of life and when painted, varied and unique. Mine would be a mixture of social responsibility and natural endeavors.

“For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.” Hilary Mantel

I am a country and city girl and one without the other would be unacceptable. One scenery fulfills the needs the other could never replicate. My father was a farm boy, the middle child and the first to do many endeavors. He was the first child in his family to be bused to school, was a terrific student but with a will to be independent he took off to explore. He worked odd jobs to buy his first piece of cool transportation. That car triggered his solo flight to somewhere, anywhere, leaving his mother to mourn his departure. My mother was a city girl who touted education as a way to success. Their individual outlooks on life seem to clash but it worked for them. They eventually sharpened the other to be respectively educated and likewise garner a love of the natural world.

The foundation of life was set long ago, centuries to be exact. The million dust particles are but the sand dunes we are destined to crawl through. I believe it is education and a love of reading, inquiring philosophically, psychologically and spiritually, regarding man’s destiny, that serves us well. And when we need a break we can rely on the beach waves to take us far, far away.

“Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.” Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Click here should you like to hear Hilary Mantel’s five Reith Lectures, Resurrection: The Art and Craft.